ABSTRACT
This chapter tackles the opposition between objectivity and subjectivity, following on from the argument in the last chapter that our deconstruction of the opposition between the two leads us to a quite different notion of what subjectivity itself is. Rather than being the simplistic commonsensical image of subjectivity – as free individual experience – that psychologists like to caricature and set themselves against in their endeavour to be ‘objective’, our understanding of subjectivity must be more complex.
As we take the next step in the argument in this chapter we see that a deconstruction of the opposition is not just an insistence that one side of the equation that has been derogated should now be celebrated, but that we need to explore the lines of force that condition the way we are invited to understand the way each of the terms is held in place. Here I explore the image of ‘humanism’ which many opponents of the old laboratory-experimental paradigm resorted to when they complained about the mechanistic reduction of experience in deceptive procedures and quantitative representation. Humanism was assumed by many to express true ‘subjectivity’ in a discipline dominated by a false ‘objectivity’ in scientific research.
I draw on the work of Michel Foucault, a figure sometimes associated with Derrida as one of the ‘post-structuralist’ critics in the human sciences, and use his critique of humanism as a historically specific form to ‘deconstruct’ it. While many psychologists are suspicious of humanism because it appears to be unscientific, humanism is powerful outside the discipline 18as the site of individualistic self-actualizing popular psychology. Humanism thus operates as the reversed mirror image of what it opposes, and so I argue that we need to treat it as a social construction. In this way I take reflexivity seriously but deconstruct humanist subjectivity.
